Andrew Nagorski - Hitlerland

Putzi’s mother Katharine, whose maiden name was Sedgwick, came from one of New England’s truly eminent families. Her maternal uncle was General John Sedgwick, a Civil War hero. Her father was William Heine, an architect by training who had fled Dresden after the revolution of 1848, worked on the decorations of the Paris Opera, and then emigrated to the United States. There, he joined Admiral Perry as his official illustrator on his expedition to Japan. He, too, became a Civil War general, and he helped carry Abraham Lincoln’s coffin at his funeral. Thus, it was hardly surprising that Putzi was dispatched to Harvard in 1905, both to learn more about his American heritage and to prepare him to take over the family art gallery on New York’s Fifth Avenue.

When discussing his Harvard days, Putzi always dwelled on his prominence and connections there. “I hate to say it myself: I was popular in my class,” he eagerly pointed out. Monumentally vain, Hanfstaengl was right on that score: whether he was playing Wagner or banging out marching songs on the piano for the football team, he ingratiated himself with the Harvard crowd, mingling easily with the likes of T. S. Eliot, Walter Lippmann, Robert Benchley and John Reed.

But it was an off-campus exploit that catapulted him to wider fame. On a cold morning in the spring of 1906, he was waiting for practice tryouts for the crew team on the Charles River. As Putzi recalled, “Some fool of a canoeist got into difficulties in the swift current and tipped himself out.” Without hesitating, Putzi grabbed a boat and rowed out to the canoeist who was floundering badly. Fully clothed, he jumped into the cold water and managed to push the man up into the boat. The next day, the headline in the Boston Herald proclaimed, “Hanfstaengl, Harvard’s Hero.”

Putzi maintained that this episode was responsible for his getting to know another famous Harvard student: Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., the eldest son of the president. In the winter of 1908, the father—“a fellow extrovert,” as Putzi described him—invited him to Washington. His strongest recollection of that first of several meetings with TR was a stag party in the White House basement and “of breaking seven bass strings on his magnificent Steinway Grand.”

After Harvard, Hanfstaengl returned to Germany for a year of military service in the Royal Bavarian Foot Guards, standing guard at the royal palace and generally feeling that he was trapped in an anachronistic world. He spent another year studying in Grenoble, Vienna and Rome before returning to the United States and taking charge of the family gallery on Fifth Avenue. Eating often at the Harvard Club, he met another Roosevelt—FDR, who was then a young New York state senator. He also reconnected with the elder Theodore Roosevelt. The former president told him his military service must have been good for him. “I saw something of your army at Doeberitz as the Kaiser’s guest, and discipline like that never hurt anybody,” he said. “No nation can degenerate which maintains those standards.”

Later, their conversation turned to both art and politics. “Hanfstaengl, your business is to pick the best pictures, but remember that in politics the choice is that of the lesser evil,” the former president told him. With no sense of irony, Putzi—who would later work assiduously to help Hitler as he rose to power—noted that it was a phrase “which has stuck with me ever since.”

During World War I, Hanfstaengl felt the pull of allegiance to the country of his birth. Before the United States entered the war, he tried to help the bands on German ships blockaded in New York harbor by inviting them to perform in the family gallery. Once the Americans joined the fighting, Putzi had to get a lawyer, former Senator Elihu Root, who had been TR’s secretary of state, and pledge not to engage in any anti-American activities to avoid internment.

A Department of Justice report in February 1917 offered this assessment of Hanfstaengl, whom investigators had been clearly observing: “He is not a man of criminal instinct, but if war was declared between Germany and America it probably would be best that he be interned because he has the ability of an officer to lead men either here or in Mexico.” Nicholas Roosevelt, another member of the famous clan, wrote to the authorities to say that Putzi was “violently anti-American,” that he had been in close touch with the German Embassy until it was closed down and that he was “almost a fanatical supporter of his fatherland” and “a most dangerous man to have about.”

Whatever the accuracy of that reporting, Hanfstaengl—who had recently married and had his first child—decided to return to Germany in 1921. There, he found a country “riven by faction and near destitution.” Echoing Ben Hecht’s comment about a country undergoing a nervous breakdown, he added: “It became evident to me that Germany, politically speaking, was a madhouse…” It was while he was still trying to get his bearings in his transformed homeland that Putzi took the call from his former Harvard classmate who now worked at the American Embassy in Berlin.

When Smith arrived in Munich, Putzi did what he could for him, providing a few largely social introductions. He wrote in his memoirs that Smith was “a very pleasant young officer of about thirty, a Yale man, but in spite of that I was nice to him.” He was also nice to Kay, who accompanied her husband to Munich. Putzi, who would soon become notorious for his womanizing, was the perfect gentleman with her. He showed her the sights as a light snow fell, ducking inside the Frauenkirche, whose medieval art charmed his American visitor. When they stopped at his family’s art store, he gave her an engraving of the interior of the church. “A lovely way to be introduced to Munich,” she would write later. “Perhaps this day is the reason why I have always been so fond of this place.”

As it turned out, her husband didn’t need all that much help from Putzi, who was impressed with how Truman “worked like a beaver” and met almost everyone who mattered politically. “He soon knew much more about Bavarian politics than I did,” he admitted.

On Smith’s final day in Munich, the two met for lunch. “I met the most remarkable fellow I’ve ever come across this morning,” Smith volunteered.

Putzi asked who he was talking about. “Adolf Hitler,” Smith replied.

“You must have the name wrong,” Putzi said. “Don’t you mean Hilpert, the German nationalist fellow, although I can’t say I see anything particularly remarkable in him.”

Realizing Putzi had never heard of Hitler, Smith set him straight. “There are quite a lot of placards up announcing a meeting this evening,” he pointed out. “They say he puts up signs saying ‘No entry for Jews,’ but he has a most persuasive line about German honor and rights for the workers and a new society… I have the impression he’s going to play a big part, and whether you like him or not he certainly knows what he wants.”

Smith had been given a press pass for Hitler’s appearance that evening in the Kindlkeller, a popular Munich beer hall. Since he had to take the night train back to Berlin, he asked Putzi if he could attend for him. “Could you possibly have a look at him and let me know your impressions?” he added.

Not knowing what to expect but his curiosity aroused, Hanfstaengl agreed to do so. “It is a far cry from Harvard to Hitler, but in my case the connexion is direct,” he would write years later. Or as he put it to one interviewer in recalling the chain of events that would lead him to Hitler: “All that is just by some artistry of fate.”